During the 1920s, her sister emigrated to the then-British Mandate of Palestine. According to historian Zhores Medvedev, Stalin was highly suspicious of Zhemchuzhina. He thought that she negatively influenced Molotov, and he recommended Molotov divorce her.[1]

Her brother Sam Carp was a successful businessman in the USA (Montefiore, Stalin n282)

The Molotovs shared an apartment with the Stalins. Zhemchuzhina and Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva became close friends. In November 1932, Zhemchuzhina followed and calmed Alliluyeva out from a dining room after being publicly chastised by Stalin in the company of friends. The next morning Alliluyeva was found dead of an apparent suicide. This event is believed to have fueled a secret hatred from Stalin towards Zhemchuzhina.[2]

In a secret meeting of the Politburo on August 10, 1939, the agenda item number 33, "Regarding Comrade Zhemchuzhina", her alleged "connections to spies" led to a request to verify that information by the NKVD. As it was customary during the Great Purges, many of her coworkers were arrested and questioned, but the "evidence" (frequently acquired by force) against her was so contradictory that (on October 24) the Politburo concluded the "allegations against comrade Zhemchuzhina's participation in sabotage and spying... to be considered slanderous." However, she was severely reprimanded and demoted for unknowingly keeping contacts with "enemy elements thereby facilitating their spying missions." In February 1941, she was taken off the list of the candidates to the Central Committee.

Polina Zhemchuzhina befriended Golda Meir, who arrived in Moscow in November 1948 as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR.[3] Fluent in Yiddish, Zhemchuzhina acted as translator for a diplomatic meeting between her husband, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Union's foreign minister, and Meir.

She was arrested for treason in December 1948, as she openly supported the idea of granting the region of Crimea to the Jewish community,[4] consequently divorcing with Μolotov .[5] The sentence was five years in a labour camp.[6] She was eventually reunited with her husband by Lavrentiy Beria, after the death of Stalin, in March 1953. Her first question was "How's Stalin?" Upon being told he had died only days before, she fainted.[7]

Happily and lovingly reunited, Polina Zhemchuzhina and her husband lived as unrepentant Stalinists in the Granovsky apartment block near the Kremlin. She died of natural causes in 1970.[8]